Zimmerman, who won a Tony Award for her stage adaptation of Metamorphoses, will direct opera star Renee Fleming in Rossini’s Armida during the 2009-10 season.

Also new is an ambitious, multi-show, multi-year collaboration between the Met and Lincoln Center Theater, in which Broadway composers will develop operas. Adam Guettel, whose The Light in the Piazza is a hit at LCT; Jeanine Tesori, who wrote incidental music for LCT’s production of Twelfth Night and saw her Thoroughly Modern Millie on Broadway; Tony Kushner, who worked with Tesori on Caroline, or Change; and Michael John LaChiusa, whose Bernarda Alba is now at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, will be part of the venture.

The Met and LCT jointly commissioned new works from the composers. The pieces will be workshopped—a process more common to theatre than opera—and then presented at either the Met or the Vivian Beaumont Theater. The first complete show is expected to debut during the 2011-12 season. Peter Gelb, the Met’s incoming general manager, told the Times that the arrangement “was designed to produce operas with better dramatic flow from unexpected composers and to give them a chance for improvement before hitting the stage.”

Other planned projects include a new Tosca, possibly directed by George C. Wolfe, debuting in fall 2009. Also, Richard Eyre will direct and Matthew Bourne will choreograph Angela Gheorghiu in Carmen.

For the next season, 2010-11, theatrical auteur Robert Lapage will stage a Wagner "Ring.”